Danbooru

Tag discussion: horo vs. holo

Posted under General

S1eth said:
The word "ホロ" means "wolf" in the language of the Ainu.

This is interesting, and would provide a reasonable source for her name, since many ancient Japanese myths get rolled onto the Ainu or Emishi, especially if they aren't more closely related to Shintoism or Bhuddism. (See Mononoke Hime for other examples where they used the Emishi)

I studied Ainu a bit for a linguistics class. While I don't know much, I know a bit about the language, and of some resources to refer to.

S1eth said:
I don't know what writing system the Ainu used or if there is an official romanization for it.

Ainu was mostly suppressed under the Japanese, and they didn't have a writing system of their own. Where necessary, and after Japanese linguists started taking a closer look at the language, they more or less officially adopted a modified katakana as a writing system. The modification stems from how to encode syllable codas, consonants at the end of syllables which Japanese doesn't have. For that they use half-sized katakana, so a small ク becomes a syllable-final 'k', for example.

I don't think there is a official romanization system beyond IPA. By the time western linguists took a real scientific look at Ainu, it was almost already dead. It's a bit tough at all to find Ainu references in English. One of the earliest good English texts though, and one that is still cited a lot (since it was written when there was still an active Ainu speaking community) is John Batchelor's An Ainu-English-Japanese dictionary from 1905.

Searching that, I find Wikipedia's "Horokeu"/ホロケウ = "Wolf" definition. It's tough to speculate if this is indeed where "Horo"/"Holo"'s name's etymology came from, why the "keu" was omitted. The same source defines "keu" by itself as "corpse", so I doubt it's a genuine semantic deletion. (Unless maybe Batchelor accidently pointed to a dead wolf when eliciting the word.) It could also be the common two-mora Japanese abbreviation (note most Japanese nicknames).

In any case, given it exists in an original research text, I'd vouch for "Horokeu"="wolf" in Ainu. Whether her name came from "horokeu" or not, without some sort of note from the author or editorial staff is tough to defend though.

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Shinjidude said:

In any case, given it exists in an original research text, I'd vouch for "Horokeu"="wolf" in Ainu. Whether her name came from "horokeu" or not, without some sort of note from the author or editorial staff is tough to defend though.

I seriously doubt a coincidence, this fits like a glove.

If the author intends for it to be Holo then make it Holo. We didn't use "Rokkon Sutoratosu" for "Lockon Stratos" just because that's what the katakana literally states. It's like the "Light" vs "Raito" debate in Death Note again.

Anonymous9000 said:
If the author intends for it to be Holo then make it Holo.

I'd like to ask again about this, can you provide something that actually shows it was the author who made the decision? I have yet to see any real evidence that has been provided here actually linking the author to the decision. Everything provided so far has only indicated middlemen and many assumptions that perhaps the author and his staff were involved. If you're going to make this claim that it was the author's intention, I would at least like to see the proof provided. It would not hard for one middleman to screw up, and then all the rest down the road continuing to make the same mistake simply because a previous middleman said it was right.

Of course even if it was the author's "choice" in the end, I think it would be rather important to know his own level of knowledge of the English language and whether he originally thought his work would ever reach the Western market. If the author didn't expect it to ever reach the Western market and his knowledge of English was very poor, then the real decision on the spelling wouldn't really come down to him, but to whoever was assigned to translate it and who in turn would convince the author on how it is properly spelled. This would mean then that it could have come down to the first translator's decision on how to spell it, as it would not be hard to convince a person that one way of spelling it is better than the other when the person they're convincing has no knowledge on the matter (and perhaps does not care about how they spell it either).

The best evidence provided so far, has been associating her name (ホロ) with the Ainu word for wolf (ホロケウ horokeu). In which case means that saying "Holo" is correct because it is foreign is no more correct than saying "Horo" is correct in this case. In short this means that we do have a choice in deciding how we want to spell it, and are as correct using an R as we are using an L, regardless of what is being "officially" used.

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As a side note, English isn't the only language that uses the roman/lation alphabet (yes, really!) and ホロ is not an English word either, so I really don't see how the author's knowledge of the English language would affect the transliteration (romanization) of his character's name.

Anyway, can't we just ask the author?

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I only picked English because it was easier to not word it weird, as I was having trouble making it more neutral and cover all roman alphabet languages (roman alphabet just wasn't even popping in my mind), but I think the point is that if the author only knows Japanese than the person who makes the decision in the end, isn't really him, but the translator who comes along and would tell him that is the correct spelling, thus meaning that the decision wasn't ever really the author's but the translator who told him what was right.

S1eth said:
Anyway, can't we just ask the author?

Would be worth a shot.

Edit: Maybe he swiped the name after watching/reading Shaman_King from the character Usui Horokeu who apparently goes by the name Horohoro (ホロホロ)

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NWF_Renim said:
Edit: Maybe he swiped the name after watching/reading Shaman_King from the character Usui Horokeu who apparently goes by the name Horohoro (ホロホロ)

It's still completely speculation, but it fills in all the gaps, positively links the name to Ainu (since the Shaman King character is an in-universe Ainu using the proper Ainu word as his name), demonstrates how an abbreviation would have come about (since the character uses a reduplicated two mora abbreviation as a nickname in canon), and provides a plausible source for the name to have been drawn from (Most Evangelion characters' names were explicitly drawn from previous anime characters and WWII vessels).

Except that Holo isn't Ainu or from Japan.

She's from northern parts of Europe, and she's from a series that takes great care to present actual, pre-capitalist European economics and society. All of the other names in the setting are real European names too.

So, I have no idea why anyone thinks the author would use an abbreviated Ainu name in the setting. It boggles the mind, frankly.

Plus, it's pretty useless as a determinant, since you're transliterating from Ainu to Japanese to English, and the choice to use "R" instead of "L" for the Japanese ロ is essentially arbitrary since it doesn't represent either English sound.

BCI_Temp said:
Except that Holo isn't Ainu or from Japan.

She's from northern parts of Europe, and she's from a series that takes great care to present actual, pre-capitalist European economics and society. All of the other names in the setting are real European names too.

So, I have no idea why anyone thinks the author would use an abbreviated Ainu name in the setting. It boggles the mind, frankly.

It's been awhile since I saw the show, but I do not recall it necessarily being indicated that Holo/Horo was of the same culture as the rest. If anything wasn't it indicated or suggested that where ever she originated from is potentially long gone? Most of it relegated to legends and dusty forgotten history books. Her homeland is quite far away, so the areas depicted in the series do not have to represent at all the culture of the people that she herself originated from.

Additionally I think you're also ignoring that in terms of location, the Ainu themselves live in the North of Japan on Hokkaido and as wikipedia has written for it "is known for its cool summers and icy winters." If anything, I think that does more to indicate that there is a potential link, than that there isn't any link at all.

It's also not an uncommon theme in series of a character or enemy originating from an older culture that is completely different or alien to the modern cultures around, so trying to tie the culture she is from simply based on what is depicted in their current time frame does not necessarily work well.

She is supposed to be an very old harvest god whose patron village more or less stopped believing in her. She originated from a place called "Yoitsu" in the snowy northern region of their world, a place to which she wishes to return.

The simple fact is that she is an ancient wolf-god (older than the establishment religion in their world) and from the snowy north and has a name that can pretty reasonably be tied to the Ainu word for "wolf". (The Ainu are/were an ancient Japanese cultural group, older than the established Shinto and Buddhist religions of the country, that existed in the snowy northern regions of Japan). I don't think it's fair to say that there is no good (albeit unconfirmed) evidence to link Horo/Holo at least metaphorically with the Ainu.

As for the setting being western or European, that's true in a sense, but despite the appearance of a pre-capitalist western setting, there is no effort to actually label it European or link it to any real world region. The same situation applies as in say Slayers or Record of Lodoss War that also have European-like fantasy settings.

She's explicitly from the north, not the far east -- as in relative to Europe, where the series takes place, not Japan.

The logic chain of "Holo comes from the North (of Japan), Holo is Ainu, her name is actually a version of Horkew/Horokeu (shortened for some reason), and the Ainu sound for that must be romanized 'R' (when it's actually even closer to a D than the Japanese sound)" is weak on all points.

I'm sorry, but I can't see such a tenuously threaded together chain of reasoning trump what other official sources have said.

The ロ = 'ro' vs ロ = 'lo' is always going to a pretty arbitrary, since English doesn't use the Japanese 'r' [ɾ] as a regular consonant (though it does appear). As best I can tell from the references I've seen, the Ainu 'r' is essentially the same sound. (Though that's probably hard to tell anymore given the degree of assimilation Ainu has undergone, there are no monolingual native or even primary speakers left)

The convention is to call it an 'r' and that's what looks better to most people used to standard romanization. If you look at other European languages, it is very very similar to a the sound encoded 'r' in Spanish and some French dialects. A rolled 'r' in those languages is essentially just a trilled version of the Japanese 'r'. [ɾ] is usually treated by most linguists as a rhotic sound (R-like) rather a lateral, like [l]. It's not quite the "halfway between 'r' and 'l'" many people call it.

I'm just not sure what the debate is here on transliterating the name into Roman letters - "Holo/Horo" is not a Japanese name and is written in katakana no matter where it derives from, and official sources (including the TV show itself) spell it as "Holo" when using Roman letters. "Horo" is a fan convention based on Japanese pronunciation and what supposedly "looks right". If it were an actual Japanese name I could see the argument and we should follow the Danbooru romaniztion rules, but it's no more of an actual Japanese name than the "Light" in Light Yagami (tagged here as yagami_light and not yagami_raito), and he's even actually ethnically Japanese. No matter the etymology, even if it is in fact from Ainu language it's still not Japanese and is written as if it is a foreign word. In the case of non-Japanese names I say we go with the official Romanized spelling.

If it were written in hiragana, I'd say "Horo"... but it isn't.

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